Trump’s Cuba Strategy Is Economic Genocide
06-12-2026 ~ In an interview, scholar Danny Shaw discusses President Donald Trump’s policy of strangling Cuba and offers an anatomy of the impact of the economic embargo on its people after having witnessed firsthand the existing conditions on the island.
Cuba has been under a US trade embargo since the Eisenhower administration, although it was President John F. Kennedy who implemented a comprehensive embargo on all trade with Cuba. And while every subsequent administration has tried since to cause pain and suffering to the Cuban people for its support of a revolutionary government, it is the Trump administration that has made the collapse of the communist regime on the island a top priority by expanding sanctions against the island, blocking fuel deliveries, and threatening Cuba with military action.
Cuba is indeed on the brink and unlikely to survive since the inhumane and criminal actions of the second Trump administration have plunged the island into a deep humanitarian crisis.
In the interview that follows, Danny Shaw discusses President Donald Trump’s policy of strangling Cuba and offers an anatomy of the impact of the economic embargo on its people after having witnessed firsthand the existing conditions on the island. Danny Shaw is a scholar of Latin American and Caribbean studies and a longtime supporter of the Cuban revolution. He recently traveled across Cuba, where he documented for The Grayzone the harrowing conditions following the Trump administration’s imposition of an energy blockade.
C. J. Polychroniou:US President Donald Trump has revived the Monroe Doctrine with a series of forceful actions in the Western Hemisphere, such as the attack on Venezuela, which resulted in the kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, and conducting military strikes against fishing boats in the Caribbean. It may not be totally clear what’s driving the Trump administration’s gunboat diplomacy, but Cuba, which has endured perhaps the longest economic embargo in modern history, is next on the wannabe dictator’s hit list.
Danny, can you talk about the policy methods the second Trump administration has used in order to further isolate Cuba and, in the process, strangle its economy and its people?
Danny Shaw: On January 29, the Trump administration—the true spokesman of the billionaire class with global reach, as we’ve seen from Caracas to Tehran—took actions to completely shut down the Cuban economy. Threatening any country that sold oil to Cuba or continued to trade with them tightened the screws on an already long-existing, illegal, unilateral Economic War. Washington and their right-wing minions across the hemisphere also went after Cuban medical missions from Honduras to Jamaica, which brought much-needed foreign reserves for Cuba and most importantly afforded medical attention throughout the Americas and the world to marginalized populations. Ecuador and Costa Rica kicked out the Cuban embassies. The Trump administration has made it clear to the world: Any attempt to support the Cuban government will be severely criminalized. Concretely, this means Cuba is more isolated and desperate than it has ever been.
We must see Trump’s energy blockade in the context of an economic blockade which has left Cuba on life support since 1991, the year the Soviet Union and the Socialist Block countries fell. Overnight, these measures cut Cubans’ average caloric intake in half. Periodically, under both Democratic and Republican presidencies, the US government has taken a scalpel to the Cuban economy. With a Gazaesque strategy of surgical precision, the State Department has cut off remittances, wiped out tourism, and penalized any foreign company that did business with Cuba. January 29 was yet another inflection point of what has truthfully been an ongoing “special period” and is now proving to be a death sentence for many Cuban families. Now the FBI and Homeland Security are going after those of us who have brought humanitarian aid to Cuba.
Every word I share, including my quotation of hungry and dispirited Cubans, has to be seen within the context of a 67-year-old war on a country that has sought to be sovereign from empire. As an ethnographer, an international affairs analyst for Cuban and Venezuelan television since 2014, and someone building fluency in Cuban Spanish for over three decades, I have had a lot of intimate contact with Cubans, their opinions, and their struggles. We have to go back to the original State Department memorandum as laid out by Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs Lester Mallory on April 6, 1960:
..it follows that every possible means should be undertaken promptly to weaken the economic life of Cuba. If such a policy is adopted, it should be the result of a positive decision which would call forth a line of action which, while as adroit and inconspicuous as possible, makes the greatest inroads in denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.“
I quoted the ruling class’s thinking at length because that is precisely what has been happening in Cuba now since at least 1991. The US method of stoking “hunger” and “desperation” has completely crushed this fascinating, historical experiment in resistance and a people’s government. What I witnessed in Cuba in February, March, and April of this year was apocalyptic. Read more
The Mirror Of Neolithic Art: How Çatalhöyük Confronts The Hubris Of The Modernist Perspective
The famous wall painting from Çatalhöyük depicts tightly clustered domestic houses beneath an erupting volcano. Photo/Illustration by Asya Denk.
06-10-2026 ~ The theme for an exhibition that opened on June 4, 2026, at Ankara University’s Faculty of Political Science (Mülkiye), World’s First City Plan/Map, as part of my Arkeopolitics initiative, was met with reservations by a group of students from the Middle East Technical University’s faculty of architecture. They questioned how the map—exhibited in the Çatalhöyük section of the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations—could be called a work of art, reflecting the flawed modern perspective.
A young architect candidate objected and said: “Professor, how can this be a map? The houses are seen from above the (plan), but the mountain is seen from the profile (section). There is a serious perspective error here. Furthermore, a ‘mind’ capable of drawing a map could not have developed in that period.”
“In that case, should we also consider Picasso’s works irrational?” I responded.
Even though the hubris of the modern mind did not show at that exact moment, it was actually an “aha!” moment, the impact of which has been felt over time.
The people of Çatalhöyük depicted the world not “as it is”—in the sense we claim to understand today—but “as they felt and conceptualized it.” The truth is that the rational, perspectival gaze, or what we call “as it is,” is nothing more than a form that the modern mind “feels and conceptualizes” the world through. Therefore, the map is a work of art within its own period and context.
The Çatalhöyük Gaze
That bird’s-eye view that we see through drones today was a daily reality for the Çatalhöyük residents. In a settlement with no streets, where entry to houses was through roofs, life flowed on the rooftops. Socializing, working, and playing took place in the shared public space stretching across the roofs. Thus, the artists drawing the city depicted it from the angle they knew best—from above—and it was not a technical inadequacy or deficiency; on the contrary, it was sociological honesty. In fact, the equal stature of all the houses in the drawing also revealed the egalitarian structure of the settlement. They simply did not know (and see!) it any other way.
As for the mountain being shown from the front, besides its conformity to human vision and reality, it points to a colossal shared/natural constant that either threatened the entire city and/or held it at its skirts to give it its identity.
The claim that the “mountain” was the well-known “leopard skin” was also quite popular for a time, partly fueled by the notion that it could not be a map (so much so that Stephanie Meece wrote in her article that attributing cartography, which she deemed a Western phenomenon, skill, and invention, to Çatalhöyük was absurd). However, other studies replicating how a leopard skin is cut and splayed open have largely marginalized this view. Besides, a shape that erupts is highly likely to be a mountain. Today, we know that Mount Hasan, which looms on the horizon of Çatalhöyük, erupted while the Çatalhöyük settlement existed. We also know that obsidian, the industrial raw material that gave the settlement its character, came from it and other volcanoes in the region.
In short, nothing could be more natural than for the “mountain”—with its socioeconomic and sociopsychological significance for the settlement—to shape the art of the period, including the way it was depicted. Especially considering the importance a mountain (and a cave) held in almost all societies, from Upper Paleolithic shamanism to monotheistic religions.
The only significant complication here lies in the perspective of the depiction: the higher of the mountain’s two cones appears on the right side of the wall painting, whereas it is actually on the left when looking directly from Çatalhöyük, which is located just more than 100 kilometers away from the mountain. Crucially, this higher cone appears on the right only when viewed from Aşıklıhöyük—the pioneering settlement situated almost at the very foothills of the mountain. Given the roughly 150-year historical transition between the two sites, a direct cultural representation from Aşıklıhöyük seems unlikely. Alternatively, since geological hypotheses suggesting a later structural shift or eruption-induced alteration in the crater’s topography are highly implausible, it is far more rational to consider this specific rendering as the perspective or narrative of those who might have traveled directly to the base of the mountain for obsidian extraction.
In this sense, instead of capitulating to the modernist perspective that strips the painting of its cartographic value just because it lacks contemporary conventions, this composition should be recognized as a map in its own right—one that perfectly served the practical and existential needs of its own era. Much like the widely discussed interpretations of Upper Paleolithic cave art—where non-hunting depictions of animals are viewed as markers tracking seasonal paths, or where representations like the “Gargas hands” are interpreted as early “mapping” to signal game and demarcate secure travel routes—this rendering stands as a foundational cartographic practice: a vital transfer of a landscape’s economic and symbolic center of gravity onto a spatial plane.
After all, as we know from the enduring debates surrounding the Mercator projection, the modern era’s two-dimensional cartography is anything but an objective reflection of reality; by stretching the globe from the north, it systematically constructed a deeply Eurocentric worldview that we have long misconstrued as “normal.” Therefore, it is hardly surprising that the bewildered reaction of students seeing the Gall-Peters map on my office wall for the first time mirrors the same cognitive dissonance as the architecture student who confidently dismissed the Çatalhöyük painting for its apparent lack of “proper” perspective. It seems the modern mind simply cannot tolerate any reality that refuses to fit into its indoctrinated geometric grid.
The Relationship Between Art and Modernity
What is art? What about perspective and/or intellect? Or let us ask this way: Is the prescribed mode of thought that we call the perspective of the modern mind the only absolute way of seeing and showing reality? After all, wasn’t it the modern mind that warned us against unfalsifiable, single, and absolute truths?
Perhaps the real distortion belongs to the modern mind, which mistakes its own singular, rigid perspective for absolute objective reality. So, who is truly lacking perspective here? The Çatalhöyük artist who integrated multiple dimensions of lived experience onto a single wall, or the modern observer who looks at that wall and sees only a “technical error”?
Fortunately, we have mirrors like the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations in Ankara—where this unique wall painting is housed—and countless other institutions across every corner of the globe that safeguard the monumental heritage of the Paleolithic and Neolithic eras. These spaces invite us to break free from the shackles of the prescribed modern mind. That is, of course, if we are ready to accept what we so condescendingly label as “prehistory”—believing that history only begins when a society expresses itself through a script we happen to have successfully deciphered—is actually a rich history filled with sophisticated products of intellect and art. After all, Homo sapiens, who have existed for roughly 250,000 years—and the Neanderthals, who went extinct about 40,000 years ago—possessed art and engaged profoundly with their environments, both to share their narratives within, between, and beyond generations, and to survive in a symbiotic relationship with the spaces they inhabited.
A shorter version of this article was published in Turkish in Ankale Sanat, June 3, 2026. This article was produced by Human Bridges.
By Erdem Denk
Author Bio: Erdem Denk is a professor of international law and international relations at Ankara University and the founder of the transdisciplinary research initiative Arkeopolitics, which integrates archaeology, history, political theory, and legal history to reinterpret the long-term dynamics of human societies. His research focuses on the evolution of law and social order since the Paleolithic. He is the author of The 50,000-Year World Order: Societies and Their Laws (2021, in Turkish) and is currently working on three books, in Turkish and English, titled When There Was No State, The Invention of the State, and The Story of the State.
The Long History Of Controlling Water—And Why It No Longer Works
06-08-2026 ~ For 6,000 years, humans have controlled water to serve their needs, but a warming planet is revealing the limits of that approach.
The defining signature of the past 6,000 years of human civilization is the domestication of the hydrosphere—capturing, damming, canalizing, reorienting, propertizing, privatizing, consuming, profiting from, depleting, and poisoning it. From ancient hydraulic civilizations to the hydro-powered superdams, reservoirs, canals, and ports of the 21st century, water has been repurposed for humanity, often at the expense of millions of other species that depend on it.
Harnessing the hydrosphere has shaped societies and the distinctiveness of cultures across history. The design of hydraulic infrastructure has partially fated societies to the entropic costs that led to their demise—and sometimes collapse. Unlike in the past, the entropic consequences of water use during the fossil-fuel-based Industrial Revolution—the water-energy nexus—have eclipsed localities, regions, and continents, propelling Earth into the sixth extinction of life.
Now, the hydrosphere is freeing itself, spasming in ways unimaginable half a century ago. Waters are breaking loose as Earth warms, altering water cycles and producing effects humans can scarcely manage. A conversation is beginning about mobilizing collective efforts to free the waters and allow the hydrosphere to self-evolve. These responses are admirable and imperative, reflecting our learning to let go of infrastructural restraints imposed over centuries.
Roughly 70 percent of Earth’s surface is water, but only 2.5 to 3 percent is fresh water, and only a fraction is readily accessible. A 2021 study found that less than 19 percent of land remains wilderness, as human development has diminished or eliminated ecosystems worldwide. Increasingly, the hydrological cycle is reshaping the planet—deconstructing infrastructure and rewilding landscapes—leaving humanity to adapt to a new nature.
During the industrial era, urban and suburban communities were built over once-vibrant floodplains, which were drained, dammed, and diverted. In Great Britain, 90 percent of wetlands have disappeared, along with much native wildlife, as urban-industrial landscapes expanded. Efforts across the U.K. and elsewhere aim to free rivers, restore floodplains and habitats, and decommission dams, teaching us to adapt to water rather than force water to fit development. These efforts are urgent, as intensifying hydrological cycles threaten rural and urban infrastructure. Citizen scientists and volunteers, working with marine biologists and local governments, are rewilding fish nurseries and salt marshes and supporting projects that absorb carbon, reduce flooding, and restore native species.
While oceans were reduced to property and remain under severe strain, scarce freshwater has also been commodified and controlled in the global marketplace by a handful of corporations. Until the late 20th century, fresh water was largely administered publicly as a common resource. Over the past half-century, it has increasingly been seized by private companies and transformed into a tradable commodity. In practice, private companies often have little incentive to upgrade infrastructure or lower costs. Unlike public systems, market-based utilities must maintain revenue and profit margins even if populations remain stable, leading to the continuous extraction of value, especially in water and sanitation services, where communities have few choices.
Despite evidence of privatization’s shortcomings, ten global companies dominate the water utility market. They profit from government incentives, charge high water prices, and sometimes compromise service quality. In the United States, industry-owned utilities typically charge 59 percent more for water and 63 percent more for sewer service than local government utilities. Privatization can also increase financing costs for water projects by 50–150 percent, while municipalities that resumed public operations achieved average savings of 21 percent across water and sewer services.
A lingering misconception is that a warming climate means we are running out of water. While heavier rainstorms and floods are widely acknowledged, they are often treated separately from droughts. In reality, the planet is not running out of freshwater; a rewilding hydrosphere driven by climate change is altering the seasonal timing, intensity, and duration of precipitation. Global hydraulic civilization remains locked into a water cycle suited to a temperate climate that no longer exists, leaving humanity unable to reliably access water for consumption, industry, or agriculture when and where it is needed.
The long-term solution is to reset humanity’s relationship with the hydrosphere—adapting to the waters rather than attempting to control them. A growing suite of initiatives, including “Slow Waters,” “Sponge Cities,” “Nature-Based Systems,” and “Green Infrastructure,” reflects this shift. These approaches move away from centralized, hyperefficient hydraulic systems designed for Holocene-era predictability and toward adaptive systems responsive to the rewilding hydrosphere of the Anthropocene. Philosophically, they shift the focus from managing water to stewarding it—going with the flow rather than attempting to direct it. Read more
Investing In Care: A Public-Private Model For Youth Opportunity
06-08-2026 ~ A scalable model that combines education, paid work, mentorship, and healthcare to support vulnerable youth.
If we are to understand the conditions facing vulnerable children, we have to begin with a difficult truth: poverty remains the central force shaping their lives. It is not the only factor, but it is the most consistent one—structuring access to health, education, safety, and opportunity from the earliest years onward.
Children, by definition, are dependent. Their well-being is tied to the systems that surround them—family, school, community, and public institutions. When those systems are strained by poverty, the effects are not marginal. They are often paralyzing. Barriers to opportunity—whether in the form of underfunded schools, unstable housing, environmental hazards, food insecurity, or lack of healthcare—are not experienced as abstract policy failures. They are lived constraints that narrow what a child can imagine for their future.
Research has repeatedly shown that childhood poverty affects educational attainment, physical health, mental health, and long-term earnings potential. Children raised in economically unstable households are more likely to experience chronic stress, lower academic performance, and reduced social mobility. These patterns are not isolated outcomes. They reinforce one another across time.
It is tempting to respond to this reality with calls for sweeping transformation—to eliminate poverty altogether or radically redesign the systems that produce inequality. But in the absence of such transformation, the question remains: what can be done now?
The answer may lie in a more grounded approach. If we cannot yet abolish poverty, we can still confront it—carefully, persistently, and in the details. We can examine where harm occurs, where opportunities are blocked, and where support is insufficient. And we can begin to build systems that respond not in fragments, but with coherence and intention.
From Fragmentation to Comprehensive Services
One of the defining features of current approaches to child welfare is fragmentation. Education, healthcare, workforce development, and social services are often treated as separate domains, each with its own funding streams, eligibility criteria, and institutional boundaries. Programs exist, but they rarely form a continuous pathway.
The result is a patchwork system in which children and families must navigate multiple entry points, often without guidance and often at moments of crisis. Support is reactive rather than preventive. Transitions—from early childhood to adolescence, from school to work—are especially vulnerable points where many fall through the gaps.
A different approach begins by shifting from isolated interventions to comprehensive services. This does not mean a single program that attempts to do everything. It means designing systems so that the supports children need—education, health, mentorship, and opportunity—are aligned, accessible, and sustained over time.
Healthcare is especially important in this framework because childhood well-being is inseparable from physical and mental health. Untreated medical conditions, chronic stress, trauma, nutritional instability, and lack of preventive care all shape educational outcomes and long-term stability. Yet healthcare systems for low-income children are frequently overstretched, fragmented, or difficult to access consistently.
To make such an approach workable, it helps to organize the problem—and the response—into three practical frames: what can be stopped, how resilience can be built, and what communities themselves can do. Read more
How Humans Have Driven Bird Populations To The Brink Of Extinction
08-06-2026 ~ From DDT and pesticide exposure to collapsing insect populations and habitat disruption, birds are warning us about the growing environmental pressures reshaping ecosystems worldwide.
In 1963, Joseph Hickey—a professor of wildlife management at the University of Wisconsin—read Derek Ratcliffe’s recently published paper on the peregrine falcon’s status in Britain. The report highlighted the bird’s desertion of nesting territories and suggested that pesticides might be responsible for the falcon’s precipitous decline. As he absorbed Ratcliffe’s alarming analysis, Hickey recalled a rumor he had heard the previous year that not a single peregrine chick had fledged in the Northeastern United States.
Ratcliffe highlighted the bizarre egg breakages and disappearances that he and others had documented in peregrine nests since 1949 and speculated on the causes of this unprecedented ornithological phenomenon. One possible cause, he wrote, might be “defects of the egg.” “If, for some reason, Peregrine eggshells had recently become thinner,” he continued with visionary boldness, “an increase in breakage might be expected.” But he conceded that he had not measured the thicknesses of the broken eggshells, and given the normal thinning of shells during incubation, none of the eggs he’d examined seemed unusual.
Reading these speculations, Hickey noted that Ratcliffe’s hypothesis could be objectively tested. “I am told poultry science people… routinely measure shell thickness,” he wrote on Ratcliffe’s manuscript, recommending that the British scientist measure peregrine eggs collected before and after 1950 to compare them. Another of Ratcliffe’s colleagues, Desmond Nethersole-Thompson—an authority on birds of the Scottish Highlands—commented that eggshell thickness was related to eggshell weight, so Ratcliffe could evaluate shell thickness by weighing older eggs and comparing their weights to those of more recently laid eggs.
Although there were many possible explanations for thinner eggshells, in 1968, Hickey and his research partner Daniel Anderson provided scientific evidence that the synthetic insecticide dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethan
Over time, more studies added to a growing body of evidence suggesting that DDE wasn’t just correlated with eggshell thinning, but was actively causing it. When scientists fed DDE to mallards in a laboratory, the ducks subsequently laid thin-shelled eggs. Captive American kestrels that were fed DDE in different doses showed a related range of eggshell thicknesses. And British birdwatching chemist David Peakall showed conclusively that DDE was absent from eggs before the DDT era but present in eggs from 1947 onward. Furthermore, the levels of DDE in shell membranes and traces of the original egg contents were directly related to the thickness of the eggshells that enclosed them. Skeptics’ claims that eggshell thinning had occurred before DDT was widely used were finally laid to rest.
Despite growing scientific evidence that DDT was harmful to wildlife, powerful agrochemical and farming interests fought mightily to preserve the use of the wonder product that had protected millions of soldiers and civilians from insect-borne diseases in World War II, spared acres of crops from the ravages of insect pests, and promised to help eliminate diseases such as malaria. In doing so, influential parties—backed by the Department of Agriculture, which was responsible for the development and registration of pesticides until the Environmental Protection Agency was founded in 1970—faced a growing tide of public concern about the indiscriminate use of pesticides and their potential effects on wildlife and human health.
Often, the overarching concern of environmental poisons is their insidious, unintended effects. Countless birds either feed on insects year-round or provide insects to their fast-growing nestlings as a protein source during the breeding season. But the widespread use of neonics is increasingly believed to be a major contributor to the alarming disappearance of insects—a phenomenon serious enough to be dubbed an insect apocalypse—and is being documented by scientists in the U.S., Europe, and other parts of the world. The rest of us are taking notice, too. Car windshields used to be smeared with dead insects during night drives in our childhood summers, but windshields are now disturbingly clear.
The state of the world’s bird populations is widely viewed as an indicator of the health of our environment. And while the reasons for current bird declines are as varied as rays of sunlight deflected through a crystal prism, the dark-eyed, smoke-backed peregrine and its DDT-suffering compatriots taught us in the 1960s and beyond that pesticides are a threat that merits our utmost attention.
Fortunately, on August 20, 1999, amidst a gathering of more than 1,000 celebrants, the American Peregrine Falcon (Falco peregrinus subsp. anatum) was officially delisted, or removed, from the federal list of endangered species. The move followed thirty-five years of work by numerous organizations and thousands of people.
A variety of biological factors contributed to the peregrine’s successful recovery in North America. The falcon’s relatively small population made it easier to establish and reach manageable restoration goals. The peregrine’s docility and long relationship with humanity made breeding it in captivity relatively easy once successful techniques had been developed. The bird’s longevity and generally high survival rate enabled a greater return on captive breeding investments than in organisms with low survival rates or shorter lifespans. The tendency of peregrines to return to their natal areas allowed vacated regions to be targeted and repopulated. And the falcon’s flexibility in adopting atypical nest sites in areas where food was abundant helped bolster overall peregrine numbers. But the banning of DDT in 1972 was, indisputably, the most important factor—and the most important action taken—in recovering North America’s peregrines.
Perhaps the most fundamental takeaway from the peregrine’s conservation success story is that the primary threat to a declining species must be dramatically curtailed—if not eliminated—for sustainable population recovery to be achieved. Ultimately, every species in North America that experienced DDT-induced eggshell thinning, reproductive failure, and population decline recovered. In the meantime, it became clear that birds—when conspicuous, easily viewed, and intensively studied—could be successful indicators for detecting and monitoring the effects of contaminants and other environmental perturbations.
Conservation biologist Thomas Lovejoy, who coined the concept “biological diversity” after witnessing the Amazon’s ecological riches in 1965, said, “If you take care of birds, you take care of most of the environmental problems in the world.” Birds are visible, vocal sentinels that alert us to a warming climate, disappearing and deteriorating habitats, declining insect populations, hidden and not-so-hidden poisons, toxic air and water, excessive persecution, resource scarcities, invasions of foreign organisms, the proliferation of harmful trash, and even outbreaks of new diseases. We do well to listen and respond to the tales birds tell us through their declining numbers or their failure to thrive, since their status so often warns us of perils that threaten other organisms, including humankind.
By Sophie A.H. Osborn
Author Bio: Sophie A. H. Osborn is an award-winning environmental author, conservationist, and wildlife biologist whose work has focused on the study and protection of bird species across the United States, Central America, and South America. She contributed to the reintroduction of several endangered birds and served as field manager for the California Condor Reintroduction Program in Arizona. Her books include Condors in Canyon Country, which won the 2007 National Outdoor Book Award for Nature and the Environment, and Feather Trails: A Journey of Discovery Among Endangered Birds, published in 2024. Her writing has appeared in BirdWatching, Birding, Wyoming Wildlife, and Sojourns magazines.
Credit Line: This adapted excerpt is from Sophie A.H. Osborn’s Feather Trails: A Journey of Discovery Among Endangered Birds (2024, Chelsea Green Publishing). It is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-
How Propaganda And False Information Are Undermining Humanitarian Work
Chloe Bruce – Photo: LAProgressive
06-07-2026 ~ From vaccine hesitancy to conflict-zone rumors, false information is making it harder for humanitarian organizations to build trust, protect civilians, and save lives.
In today’s post-truth era, where “objective truth” has lost influence in the public sphere, it is becoming increasingly difficult for humanitarians, who seek to preserve human life, to carry out their work.
“The post-truth era has dramatic repercussions on humanitarian work, not only because it affects NGOs’ reputation, but also because it presents a distorted vision of the reality of people in need,” says Lubiana Gosp-Server, a humanitarian and development professional.
Humanitarians tackle hidden or poorly understood social issues and help people in difficult or extreme situations. All of this is threatened if people are no longer able to discern what is true or real.
Despite its contemporary prevalence in public discourse, fake news is not new. Propaganda and rumors have always existed and are something that humanitarians increasingly need to manage during the course of their duties, especially in the current “infoglut” environment of being bombarded with information from all sides, which exacerbates the problem.
High levels of propaganda and false information damage public trust and have led people to question whether humanitarians really have humanity’s best interests at heart.
Humanitarian Work and Its Challenges
The modern concept of humanitarianism was born from the founding of the Red Cross after the 1859 Battle of Solferino and the establishment of the First Geneva Convention, which sought to limit harm to human beings, particularly in times of war. Humanitarians uphold a set of moral principles, and though they vary by organization, they usually include high standards of truth, honesty, and integrity.
“At its core, a humanitarian is a person dedicated to reducing suffering and protecting human dignity. Whether in war zones, after natural disasters, or during health emergencies, humanitarians put people first,” explains the nonprofit Action Against Hunger.
Humanitarian organizations are not without their faults. They suffer from several issues, including a lack of accountability to those accessing their services and a history of furthering Western imperialism. Humanitarian organizations, in many instances, are responsible for supporting the political or military agendas of hegemonic powers, which often fund their work.
“NGOs have in many cases become extensions of Western foreign policy. This has most obviously been seen in contexts such as Afghanistan where many NGOs supported and formed an integral part of U.S.-led stabilization activities following the U.S. invasion in 2001,” states Jonathan Whittall, head of humanitarian analysis at Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders (MSF).
Humanitarian aid has also been used as a tool to intervene in and impact a country’s sovereignty, raising concerns about the intent behind the work. For instance, the UN Peacekeeping missions have often aligned with the political interests of the US and other members of the Security Council.
Whittall says that it is essential for humanitarian organizations to stick to their core mission of representing the interests of the marginalized rather than furthering the “interests of the core state,” and that they need to form alliances with social movements, grassroots organizations, etc., to be truly effective. This is necessary for these organizations to “regain their legitimacy and face with integrity the push-back from those in power who see the delivery of assistance as impinging on their political and military strategies.”
Humanitarians also need to be aware of how false information (sometimes called misinformation) and propaganda (sometimes called disinformation) undermine their ability to do their job, worsen already complex crises, harm the people they are trying to help, and can even result in their death.
“The emergence of hybrid conflicts, mixing the spread of harmful information and cyber operations with kinetic operations, creates more suffering for affected populations. Harmful information… hinders the work of humanitarian organizations by calling into question their mandates and intentions, undermining their integrity, and making them and their staff a target of online and offline harassment and violence,” according to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).
Humanitarians are uniquely positioned to help combat this problem by working with communities to address concerns both caused by and arising from the spread of false information. Read more